Topical: Tabloids and Supplements (Dose 1 of 2)
Kirsty Hendry explores Tabloid’s™ creep from medicine to media
Kirsty Hendry is an artist and facilitator living in Glasgow who develops projects exploring bodily knowledges and science fictions. Kirsty and their commensal collaborators work across writing, artist moving image, and other practices of metabolising information.
The smallest medicine chest in the world. Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Credit: The romance of exploration and emergency first-aid from Stanley to Byrd. Source: Wellcome Collection.
She excitedly attends a talk about ‘narrative medicine’. As the talk unfolds, it slowly dawns on her that the others in the room believe it to be a theoretical, rhetorical tool; a means of building healthcare professionals’ capacities for empathising with their patients by focusing on ‘close readings’ of ‘texts’. It’s clear she’s not on the same page, she cringes at her misreading.She had erroneously intuited the term as having something to do with the medicinal properties of narrative, and hoped that the talk might help expand upon her own experience; that words and stories and memoir about illness might be healing or restorative in some way—emotionally if not physiologically. As the talk unfolded, she realised that narrative medicine was being positioned as a means of extracting medical narratives from patients, in which the physician is positioned as the reader. To her though, it seemed like the role of the physician was more like an editor than a reader; the correct story, the right words are in there somewhere, waiting to be excised by a surgical hand and an editorial eye. The talk goes on to reference how the foundations of medical knowledge are based on dead bodies rather than living people—it is easier to ascribe narrative to a subject who cannot speak back. A body of text.
She wonders what kind of text she would be? She hopes she’s a good read.
She tries to ask a question to provoke discussion on whether it might be more instructive to focus on the possibilities of the patient-as-writer rather than physician-as-reader but the words don’t come out right. Her metabolism is too sluggish, she’s still chewing over the information she’s just received while also attempting to spit out an opinion of her own. The intellectual equivalent of talking with her mouth full. To retreat to the comfort of certainty, she ends her attempt at a question with a question she already knows the answer to; Does that make sense?
NO.
She had been thinking of it more literally than literary. She imagines herself shovelling fistfuls of words into her mouth—doctor’s orders. Perhaps this is why reading from a screen does not satiate her, the words just don’t go in the same way.
Much later, in a different city, she has time to kill before catching a train and wanders around a museum she has spent many hours in before. She had seen most of the permanent and temporary exhibitions on her last visit, some six months prior but she still manages to see something she hadn’t seen before. She enters a climate controlled environment that has produced an atmosphere thick with reverence, the air of encountering something whose presence demands special conditions and circumstances, like how you might coax an aloof cat out of hiding—one wrong move and the possibility of encounter vanishes. Splayed out in the centre of the room is a parchment scroll covered in bodily emissions—honey, egg, milk, vaginal fluid, words—a birth scroll from the 15th century. It promises protection from childbirth and other potentially disastrous forces of nature. Labourers have always needed protection.
She marvels at the paradox of paper being both so robust and so ephemeral, she can’t hold onto a receipt from twenty minutes ago (she will be reprimanded for this loss upon her return to the office) yet here this document endures some five hundred years later.
Like all medicines, the scroll carried instructions and directions for its use;
Gyrde thys mesure a bowte hyr wombe
To activate the scroll’s benefits, it must be applied topically.
She watches the nearby video; a talking head of the protein scientist who has analysed the scroll; a scientist who specialises in studying the biological information stored in ancient manuscripts. It reminds her of the sensation of encountering dried snot in a library book while reading in bed; a visceral incursion of past readers into what had been a moment of solitary intimacy. A residue that confirms what is already known but conveniently forgotten; our fantasies of separation, of inside and outside, are just that; fantasies. It is the same feeling she gets when someone wears outside clothes in her bed or their shoes inside her home. Unconsensual (because unintended) intimacies. She likes the idea of this material becoming as readable as the text though; she wonders what information she has leaked and shed and smeared over the years.
The scientist continues to explain her novel reading strategies. Samples are carefully harvested from manuscripts and then fed to the same digestive enzymes found in her body. These enzymes perform their analysis—chewing over the samples to discern the provenance of the stains. She is reminded of her time working in over-priced restaurants in the same city; she imagines the enzyme as some kind of sommelier; swilling and sloshing and slurping wine in order to divulge its secrets, its terroir, bouquet, mouthfeel—information only available to the most discerning of palettes—the bougiest form of divination. The scientist’s extra-textual reading of the scroll revealed the digestive enzymes had chewed over and spat out the biochemical finding confirming assumptions made about the scroll’s physical use. The stains were revealed to be the earthly remains of food items used in medieval medicine, both to be consumed by and applied to the body. A text can be consumed in so many ways if you know how.
She thinks of all the ways the body takes in information. It makes perfect sense to her that words could be received topically—absorbed straight into the bloodstream.
She completely empathises with the 15th century desire for a language that does exactly what it says.
She thinks about the information she swallows each evening—compacted into a pill, she endlessly swallows imperatives in the hope it will rewrite her bodily code.
In the museum’s cafe she orders a coffee she does not need. For some reason the memory returns to her of an idea for a project she had long abandoned, likely languishing ‘untitled’ somewhere in the glut of open tabs on her phone…something to do with the etymology of the word ‘Tabloid’. Tabloid—a word that she once associated exclusively with spurious and pernicious ‘reportage’—had originated as a term for a ‘proprietary medicine’.
She finds the idea that a newspaper and a drug might somehow be allied in both form and intention incredibly compelling. She picks up the train of thought as quickly as she had abandoned it and discovers that the proprietor of Tabloid medicine was the founder of the museum she was drinking coffee in. She consults her phone; ‘Tabloid’ was a trademarked range of products produced and distributed by Burroughs Wellcome & Co. from 1880 - 1924, prized for their “purity, accuracy, uniformity and reliability”. Tabloid™ was the source of the wealth that built the museum around her.
Later still, at home, she learns that Burroughs Wellcome & Co pioneered portable medicines—pharmaceuticals compressed and portioned into the appropriate dosage without the need for tedious weighing and measuring. She finds advertisements and trade catalogues for Burroughs Wellcome & Co. products from the 1920s and 30s held in the museum's online collection. They boast that Tabloid™ products are “famous in all parts of the world”. Tabloid’s™ portability meant that medicines could travel further, to more remote places, and withstand the most extreme climates and hostile environments. She finds advertisements that emphasise this expeditionary reach—recurring motifs of globes and maps, all territories claimed in the name of Tabloid™. Wellcome Burroughs & Co. were the ‘pioneers’ that enabled ‘pioneers’—Tabloid™ was “associated with practically every important exploring, military or missionary enterprise” of the day.
Dispensing all over the world. Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Credit: Burroughs Wellcome advertisement, Tabloid pr. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.
She finds one advert for a Tabloid™ product that depicts an ornately carved wooden figurative statue. As if chiselled into the sculpture itself, the phrase primitive pain is superimposed on the bottom of the statue. She presumes Wellcome Burroughs & Co. felt this caption provided sufficient context, offering it in lieu of any specificity as to the provenance, origin, or cultural significance of the statue. The online catalogue doesn’t offer much elucidation on the matter either; the entry describes it as an illustration of a wooden totem clutching its stomach in pain. She is left to speculate, and thinks that the statue might be Polynesian in origin. She attempts to follow the advertisement’s logic; if pain is primitive then Wellcome Burroughs & Co. see Western Medicine (and therefore themselves) as a civilising force, or more specifically, they see healing and ‘civilising’ as performing the same function. She finds the following in one of their trade catalogues; The medicine chest goes hand in hand with the advance of civilisation1
She thinks about the medical narratives, both historic and contemporary, that often position ‘otherness’ as the vector of disease. Syphilis comes to her mind—the English called it the ‘French disease’, the French called it the ‘Neopolitan sickness’, the Polish called it the ‘German disease’ and so on and so on. A disease of geopolitics inflicted by neighbouring rivals. She thinks of the abundance of invasion metaphors used to describe germs and contagion—a doubling down of xenophobic anxieties; foreign bodies carry foreign bodies. To invade an entire nation one need only invade the body of a single citizen. In Tabloid’s™ story however, empire’s foreignness believes itself to be doing the opposite; its foreignness travels not with illness, but with cures.
The more she reads the more she comes to the conclusion that cognitive dissonance is the ideological germ of the pathology that is imperialism. It’s not that imperialism simply cannot ‘see’ its own foreignness, she finally realises, it’s that it fundamentally believes it to be a category that it is immune to; white exceptionalism is both immunity and immunising. In all the archival materials she has voraciously binged, she has not found a single reference to the notion that these explorers, missionaries, travellers, colonists, planters, and ‘others’ might in fact bring disease with them. The focus is entirely on rendering illness and disease as an inevitable encounter, exposure, or infiltration. Empire was/is a vector of disease not of healing—a reminder of the harms that can be enacted under the auspices of ‘care’.
*
Wellcome Burroughs & Co.'s medicinal creep also became Tabloid's™ downfall. Its renown and ubiquity began to obscure its origins. She searches through screeds of company letters and correspondence and learns that they were both fastidious and litigious about preventing Tabloid's™ creep from drug to discourse. She finds this ironic given how clear the intention was for Tabloid ™ to be a vehicle for dispensing more than just pharmaceauticals—medicines laced with a healthy dose of ideology for good measure.
She finds a cache of letters from 1901 that document Wellcome Burroughs & Co.'s determination to protect their ownership of the word;
Our attention has been called to the inclusion of our trade mark Tabloid in Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language. This word is wrongly classified as a noun, is erroneously defined, and the statement following the incorrect definition (Dim. Of table) is un-founded.
The word Tabloid is an arbitrarily invented word or brand registered as trade mark extensively and exclusively used by us for many years throughout the world to specifically designate that goods bearing this brand or mark and manufactured put up or issued by our firm. The word being arbitrarily invented has no root.
Tabloid: An arbitrarily invented word which is a registered trade mark, specifically designating that anything baring this brand in manufactured by the proprietors of the word
The word Tabloid is an arbitrarily invented word or brand registered as trade mark extensively and exclusively used by us for many years throughout the world to specifically designate that goods bearing this brand or mark and manufactured put up or issued by our firm. The word being arbitrarily invented has no root.
Tabloid: An arbitrarily invented word which is a registered trade mark, specifically designating that anything baring this brand in manufactured by the proprietors of the word
Wellcome Burroughs & Co. kindly offer the dictionary the following (and absolute) definition;
Tabloid: An arbitrarily invented word which is a registered trade mark, specifically designating that anything bearing this brand is manufactured by the proprietors of the word 2
Wellcome credits Alfred Charles Willaim Harmsworth (later 1st Viscount of Northcliffe) as the first person to apply Tabloid to the context of newspapers. Harmsworth—she can’t help but point out the nominative determinism—a man who truly embodied the harm in Harmsworth—was the newspaper and publishing magnate responsible for both the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. Harmsworth pioneered popular journalism through simplified and sensationalised writing aimed at the working classes, but owned (of course) by the ruling class. He writes;
What a person wants in his daily morning paper is not long-winded essays, nor does he care to have undigested news by the column. He prefers it in concentrated tabloids, with all the interesting points put prominently forward, so that he can run and read.3
Tabloid—Dosage, to be taken ocularly with breakfast, or even on-the-go!
Harmsworth’s image of ‘undigested news’ sticks with her. She imagines Harmsworth’s concentrated tabloids of news like the meals regurgitated by gulls into the eager mouths of their young—their whole body a mouth—gashes of red waiting to receive pellets of material they cannot yet process on their own. Predigested news, regurgitating paternalism.
She thinks that Harmsworth—someone so supposedly invested in language—would be more attentive to the metaphors he chooses. Call her ungenerous, but she chooses to take Harmsworth's at his word, following his digestive metaphor to its (il)logical conclusion; if he is advocating for news to be issued fully digested; then he is advocating for the publishing of shit is he not?
Perhaps he was saying the quiet part out loud. She thinks of him as an archetype, so many have followed in his image, who curry favour by purporting to ‘tell it like it is’, to ‘say the things no-one else has the guts to’. Plain speaking, she thought, just like the adverts for Tabloid™ products, where sugar coating is by special request.
Harmsworth would hate her writing, she thinks. She is not one to outsource the chewing over of ideas, her writing is the digestion of a thought unfolding in realtime, the cul-de-sacs of her brain performing the same peristaltic function as her guts.
As a Wellcome Burroughs & Co. advertisement cautions;
abbreviation is dangerous
References
1. The romance of exploration and emergency first-aid from Stanley to Byrd. Published on the occasion of the Chicago Century of Progress Exposition, 1934. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Source: Wellcome Collection.https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ep6yj5em
2. Burroughs Wellcome & Co, Private Letter Book 12, Publication/Creation January - March 1903. Source: Wellcome Collection. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/snscznt6
3. Harmsworth quotes in The Age (Melbourne, Victoria) 29th January 1898 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/18493050